This cup contains recycled material!? Our drinks were recycled! This was us! A shit comment sponsored by Luke Spilsbury. Outside Costa Coffee, Warwick University Main Square God dropped his 99 (ice-cream…

This cup contains recycled material!? Our drinks were recycled!

This was us! A shit comment sponsored by Luke Spilsbury.

Outside Costa Coffee, Warwick University Main Square

God dropped his 99 (ice-cream cone).

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This weeks Hottie of the Week is one of Warehouse 13s beauties Allison…

This weeks Hottie of the Week is one of Warehouse 13s beauties Allison Scagliotti.

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Battlefield 3 will not be available for purchase on Steam, according to developers EA. The reason for this is apparently down to the restrictions that are put in place by Valve when it comes to distributing downloadable content and…

Battlefield 3 will not be available for purchase on Steam, according to developers EA.

The reason for this is apparently down to the restrictions that are put in place by Valve when it comes to distributing downloadable content and patches.

“Unfortunately, Steam has adopted a set of restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and other downloadable content.”

This probably means that EA don’t want to have to deliver these patches and DLCs via Steam, however games like Star Trek Online and Champions Online deliver content and patches via the game client and not just via Steam its self. I suspect that this is a way of making customers use Origin who would otherwise just stick to using Steam.

After all, The Sims 3 (an EA game) is kept up-to-date with patches and DLC from the Sims Store and it is still available on Steam without a problem.

It is possible that this “restrictive terms of service” are to do with the online multiplayer side of Battlefield 3, personally I think that EA should announce exactly what the problem is so that people can more easily understand.

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Bethesda are currently suing Minecraft creator John ‘Notch’ Peerson over the trademarking of a new gaming venture entitled ‘Scrolls’, the reason for this is apparently due to the similarities in with their own gaming series entitled ‘The Elder…

Bethesda are currently suing Minecraft creator John ‘Notch’ Peerson over the trademarking of a new gaming venture entitled ‘Scrolls’, the reason for this is apparently due to the similarities in with their own gaming series entitled ‘The Elder Scrolls’.

A lot of people want more details about what is going on, so here is everything I know:

First of all, I love Bethesda. I assume this nonsense is partly just their lawyers being lawyers, and a result of trademark law being the way it is.

About half a year ago, our lawyers recommended us to register “Minecraft” as a trademark, so we did. I had voted against it initially, but we did it anyway. Better safe than sorry, and all that. At the same time, we also applied for “Scrolls”, the new game we’re working on. We knew of no similarly named games, and we had even googled it to make sure. I’m not even sure if you CAN trademark individual words, like “Scrolls”, but we sent in the application anyway.

(Disclosure: We’ve enforced the trademark for Minecraft once, when there was a minecraft clone on iOS, using our name. People were emailing me saying our iOS version was buggy and bad, so we asked them to change the name of their game, and they did.)

A while later, out of the blue, we got contacted by Bethesda’s lawyers. They wanted to know more about the “Scrolls” trademark we were applying for, and claimed it conflicted with their existing trademark “The Elder Scrolls”. I agree that the word “Scrolls” is part of that trademark, but as a gamer, I have never ever considered that series of (very good) role playing games to be about scrolls in any way, nor was that ever the focal point of neither their marketing nor the public image.
The implication that you could own the right to all individual words within a trademark is also a bit scary. We looked things up and realized they didn’t have much of a case, but we still took it seriously. Nothing about Scrolls is meant to in any way derive from or allude to their games. We suggested a compromise where we’d agree to never put any words in front of “Scrolls”, and instead call sequels and other things something along the lines of “Scrolls – The Banana Expansion”. I’m not sure if they ever got back to us with a reply to this.

Today, I got a 15 page letter from some Swedish lawyer firm, saying they demand us to stop using the name Scrolls, that they will sue us (and have already paid the fee to the Swedish court), and that they demand a pile of money up front before the legal process has even started.

I assume this is all some more or less automated response to us applying for the trademark. I sincerely hope Bethesda isn’t pulling a Tim Langdell.

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This week has seen the game development company ‘Sucker Punch’ join Sony Corporation as one of it’s exclusive developers. “Sucker Punch Productions is one of the most highly acclaimed development studios in the industry and we have enjoyed a…

This week has seen the game development company ‘Sucker Punch’ join Sony Corporation as one of it’s exclusive developers.

“Sucker Punch Productions is one of the most highly acclaimed development studios in the industry and we have enjoyed a wonderful relationship with the company for over 12 years. We are delighted to officially welcome them to the SCE family,” said Shuhei Yoshida, president, SCE WWS.”

Sony has stated that Sucker Punch games inFamous and Sly Cooper have sold over seven million copies worldwide. There are apparently no plans to change the day-to-day running of the company.

“We’ve enjoyed an incredible relationship with Sony that has allowed us to combine our creative design capabilities with their guidance to make some of the best franchises to hit the PlayStation platforms. Equally important, the relationship with SCE has provided us the flexibility and trust to take creative risks and invent new properties,” said Brian Fleming, managing partner, Sucker Punch Productions.”

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